Google is moving towards performance based ranking more and more. What do I mean by this? How your site performs in terms of speed, and user experience are going to count more and more in your ranking. The days of building half a million links to some shoddy squeeze page are over: get ready for a whole new type of performance anxiety.

Yesterday, Google released Asynchronous Google Analytics code. This code allows your site to load faster because it won’t be slowed down waiting for ga.js to load. There are a lot of technical details behind how this works but the gist of it is this: Google Analytics is now MUCH faster. This means it will detect more bounces (Whereas before people could bounce before GA loaded) and it impact your overall site load time much less. This is a benefit for everyone who uses Google Analytics, but even more so because it sets up Google not to penalize people using their tracking.

Today, I see a Tweet from @MattCutts, head of the Google webspam team. Like him, love him, or hate the ground he walks on, he’s got the inside track and when he talks you should at least listen. His Tweet said: “This is important. Google provides webmaster tool to see how fast your site is: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-fast-is-your-site.html”

So, now we have a speedier analytics package and an announcement from the man himself that you need to be gauging how fast your site is. The question now becomes: How slow is too slow? Does my blog need a quad core dual processor system with RAID 4? I think that with most things, you’ll want to be in the top 20%. Luckily, the new tool shows you how your site compares to other sites using a percentage. However, if you’re gunning for a really competitive term or just want to be your best, more is better.

Take a look for yourself…

However, I find myself in a difficult spot. Urchin, the software that is “Google Analytics” used to cost a ton of money, like $500/month for a starting package. Why was it so expensive? It was so expensive because it fucking rocks. The things you can learn from GA are simply astounding. It does click mapping, funnels, traffic sourcing with geotargeting, and it shows you pretty graphs of all these things. I’ve yet to find anything better.

Here’s my thought: Do you really think NOT running GA is going to keep Google from knowing all about your site? You think they don’t know your bounce rate? Because they do. You think they don’t know your average visitor length? They know. It’s because of this, that I take a pretty sunny view of GA: If your site is half way decent, why not let Google look under the kimono? I have no problem showing them my < 50% bounce rates, or my average visitor length of 2:05. They’re going to find other ways to get this information if you buy into that viewpoint, so why not just hand it over and say, “Look how great this site is”? If you think these factors affect ranking (Which I happen to) why not make them readily available to the person ranking you?

If you’re not doing anything super shady, GA is not a big deal.